From a dark plain with a red stand-in to a chained Titan on his own hill, a town under Thera and the cave where Echidna waits. The road as it was taken, with the struggles and the feedback left in.
Before the overhaul the world was a dark plain with a few rocks, blocky ruins and survivors in underwear picking berries and wild flax. The first played hour was saved as a checkpoint, and from there the walking, jumping, crafting, menus and lettering were built one by one.
Version 0.1 pre-alpha: one click to install. The first tester went straight in, and the first crash report came with it.
The first saved screenshots: a settings menu, Thera smoking on the horizon, the forge, the first pen of deer, and the very first Prometheus, chained to a small rock in a red tunic.
The busiest day: 93 saved steps. Eight survivors got tunics and faces, Oinoe grew houses, stalls and statues, beasts could be ridden, and weapons got real animations. Plenty went wrong on the way: a door that turned bright red, a camera stuck inside a column, a moon that would not sit right.
The first art made by the studio itself: our own hen, rigged in Blender, then the rooster, then Prometheus' chains on a rock, tested again and again until the shadows held still.
We built him ourselves. It started with reference art, then a MetaHuman in the editor, then days on the crag: the boulder that swallowed him whole, the robe that flared up, a bald head, no face at all, and finally his own curly hair and beard grown on his own face.
Wood, then stone, then glass: walls, windows and roofs that had to sit on slopes and rocks without sinking in.
Workers at the bench, a farm, the glass greenhouse, a two-storey house, and beasts in colours. A lake to wade in and drink from, clay on its shore, a jetty, rain and storms.
Every beast got coat colours you can breed for. Lining them up showed which colours were too alike, and the palette was picked again until each one stood apart.
He moved to a hill 120 m from where you wake: a slope to run up, the crag grown out of the land, trees all round, a spring pool to drink from and his fire beside it. Then the last fight with the cloak, and the rock that cut through his head.
Jump at a steep rock, climb with stamina, pull yourself over the top. And every pack we own was looked at again for the Greek-myth look: umbrella pines, Mediterranean streets, ruins and Greek clothes are on their way.
The northern pines made way for Aleppo umbrella pines, and evergreen scrub oak now dots the dry hills. The first try came out bare: the needles are thousands of separate twig pieces the tree pulls in at render time, and a plain copy left them behind. Carrying those twigs over to the new trees brought the crowns back.
Four garments from a Roman outfit set, a chiton, a peplos, a long tunic and a toga, were put on a MetaHuman body in Blender, skinned in Unreal and fitted to all eight survivors. Oinoe's women now wear them, and so do the women who wake on the island. The agora got a stone fountain with palms and big jars, and a stoa to stand in out of the sun.
The old temple ruins got what their worshippers left behind: a draped statue without a head, heaps of broken pots, jars and an altar by the steps. Athena's sanctuary in Oinoe got brass incense burners and Greek pottery, and every home's courtyard altar an offering vase. At the lake the fishers now have a jetty, a rowboat, racks for drying fish and crab baskets.
The sixteen homes of Oinoe were rebuilt from the Roman Street kit: whitewashed walls, terracotta hip roofs, barred windows with shutters, an arched wooden door onto each courtyard and a coffered ceiling inside. The kit's own street houses couldn't be used as they were (most lean on a neighbour and miss a wall), so five closed houses were put together from its pieces, by the artist's own rules for roofs and cornices.
One kind of house isn't a Greek town, so Oinoe became a mix: the whitewashed homes, brick houses of one and two storeys built from the Roman Volcanic Temple kit, and some of the first Greek houses. Then streets: a path search from every gate to the agora, the streets joining into a few main ones, laid in flagstone and paved right up to the courtyard walls. Dirt tracks now lead out across the land to where you wake, Prometheus' hill, the fishers' landing and the old ruins.
The streets looked plastered on and the country tracks too clean. The tracks became trodden earth, darker than the land, ragged at the edges with footprints in them, winding round walls and rocks the way feet would. The streets became one stone surface laid over the ground, paved right into the gates and up to the walls, and every patch of ground the streets close in became a flower garden. Each courtyard got a flower bed by its gate.
Our Story Bible and technical notes went into the game whole: six acts up to the fall of Talos, quests in steps, choices that stay with you, a talk panel in bronze and gold. Prometheus speaks first, Danae keeps a spoiling granary, wolf tracks lead to a cave that breathes, and Echidna asks you to choose. Jars and urns in the wild can be smashed for coins and finds, and you can lay your own roads and paths.
A hole in the rocks was not enough: Echidna needed a true cave, with roots coming through the top and a pool of cave water. Echidna's lair is now a chamber in the hill east of Oinoe, its rock roof broken open to the sky. Dead roots hang round the hole, daylight falls on a still pool, two heroes who came with spears lie where they fell, and her nest of dead wood waits at the back.
No snake-woman in the packs we own, so we made her ourselves: her own MetaHuman, a face blended from two of the Creator's faces and picked from five, long dark hair, a sea-green tunic, and a serpent half modelled in Blender, seven metres of coils in Paragon snake skin that sway slowly as she waits on her nest.
Each scale of her serpent skin is a small diamond plate laid like a roof tile, tucked under the one in front, with a faint keel down its middle and a thin shadow where it overlaps the next. Her back is green-bronze with darker saddles, and broad cream-gold plates run down her belly. No two scales are quite the same shade.
Echidna fought us every step of the way. Her MetaHuman kept her legs, then grew a bald patch, then floated off her own coils. Her tunic came out red, her scales came out smooth as glass, her curls came out straight, and her tail folded wherever it bent. Round after round she came closer, and she was never her. In the end we struck her out completely and started again from scratch in Blender. Even then she did not come easy: on her first night in the cave she had no colour at all, her hair dragged the whole game down to a crawl, and her eyes went from painted on, to glowing, to staring, before they finally looked back at us.
We thought she was done. Then the testers looked at her tail from the side, and it was see-through, with her pale belly running along the top of her coils and knife-thin fins where the column met them. It looked perfect in Blender and broken in the game, and it took a whole night of chasing before we found the cause: her tail had been made inside out. Then came her hair. Thinned to keep the game running, it lost its curls. Put back, it floated round her head like a can of hairspray, then went bald on top, then turned to two fuzzy boas on her chest, then went straight beside her face. Every fix broke something else, until her curls finally fell the way real curls fall. She ended up with a new gold circlet with an emerald on her brow, and at last she was the mother of monsters we had pictured.
Our people had a body, but up close they looked like shop dummies: plastic skin, eyes like marbles in a hole, brows drawn on with a marker, and a white fleck on the chin that turned out to be teeth showing through lips that never quite closed. We stood them next to the survivors we play today and the difference hurt. So, round by round: skin that lets the light in and gives it back warm, eyes with depth and a wet glint, brows of fine single hairs, lips that meet. Then the eyelids glowed orange, and it took a whole evening to find out why: the eyeballs were a size too big and pushed through the lids. The work goes on until they can stand beside the old survivors without anyone missing them.
A night of play brought a list: flowers growing through floors, animals that had all gone tame, Talos stuck behind nothing, a crater you could walk into and never leave. Most of it was one hidden slip in the code that decides whether a beast flees or fights. The crater was filled with lava and given walls of rock, the workshops got real tiled roofs, and picking berries was made again by hand: four tries with ready-made animations, each worse than the last, before he finally crouched at the bush, looked at it, and reached in.
The testers kept saying the land was empty. So, in one night: dens where an alpha boar, wolf or lion keeps watch over the bones of whoever came too close, farmsteads left behind when the Iron Age fell, their vines still bearing, watchtowers to climb and chart the land from, camps where outcasts keep a fire burning, shrines where Artemis and Ares test you with beasts, stones that tell the earlier Ages of Man, the oracle of Apollo, a trader in Hermes' service who is never where he was yesterday, and the god's own waystones to travel by. Not everything made it: a hero's burial mound looked right until its door ended up half buried in the hill, and it waits for better art.
VIBES BY DEE